Footnote

By Alexander Chancellor

12:00AM BST 16 Oct 2001

PERHAPS one should never believe what any government says, for 11.5 years after the British Government formally declared Britain's "anthrax island" safe to visit, journalists still think themselves very dashing to go there.

They are far readier to disguise themselves in burqas and brave the Taliban in the fearsome mountains of Afghanistan than they are to set foot on dear little Gruinard Island off the north-west coast of Scotland. The Daily Mail yesterday devoted two pages, under the headline "My nightmare hour on Anthrax Island", to an account of a brief visit there by its reporter Michael Hanlon. He went to the island in a biological protection suit, but he and his photographer did not stay for long. "We scrambled on to a pebble beach and lingered just long enough to look around and take some pictures of this quiet, beautiful, yet evil place," he wrote. He could not wait to leave, "aware that every minute on this spot represents a small, but quite possibly deadly threat".

Gruinard Island is the place where British scientists exploded a series of anthrax bombs during the Second World War in a biological warfare experiment that proved fatal to 60 sheep. The island was closed to visitors until 1990, when it was decontaminated; and, in April of that year, a junior defence minister went ashore and formally removed its red warning sign.

A flock of sheep was released there, but none of them contracted the disease; now rats and rabbits thrive on the island. People still worry, of course, that some hardy anthrax spores might have survived, but no one seems to worry as much as the gentlemen of the press.